2025 GotY: Games of the Year

As I mentioned in the previous post, there were so many good games this year that it was hard to narrow it down to a top 10, leading to me disqualifying Type Help and Deltarune on technicalities to open up some slots. But I make the rules here, so I'm just going to add games to the list until I have what feels like a representative sample.

What more can I say about Blue Prince? I said a bunch of it back when it came out, and I kind of alluded to it a lot during my ThinkyCon talk... I want there to be more games like it, both in the "many layers of metapuzzles" way and in the "puzzle and strategy layers combining" way. Maybe both of those at once didn't work for some people, but it worked for me.

The Descent of King Hesper technically didn't come out in 2025, but it came out so close to the end of 2024 that I'm counting it. It's a massive multi-year fan level set for the Deadly Rooms of Death puzzle series, initially designed as an "entry point" with a level to introduce each mechanic the game system supports. And over the years, that's a lot of mechanics.

Lingo 2 is more of the combination of word rules discovery and exploring impossible spaces that made the first game so enthralling. There's a lot in there on both sides of that coin, and it got pretty overwhelming, but I enjoyed what I was able to see. As a sequel to a rules discovery game, it had an interesting design of challenge of having to work for people who played the first game and knew all of its rules as well as people who don't, and it changed things up just enough to succeed.

Gentoo Rescue is a grid-based puzzle about sliding penguins and walruses around on ice. The twist is that creatures have items that break the rules and interact in interesting ways, and of course the level select is another level that follows the same rules as the main puzzles, so there are "meta" mechanics of interactions between them... There have been a bunch of these since Baba is You, but this one did a really good job of not being overwhelming with features like a journal of mechanic interactions you've seen. It obviously gets Bird Game of the Year, but I think I give it Puzzle Game of the Year (For Sickos) too. It was a tough call between these first four games, though.

Glowkeeper starts off as a puzzle platformer with a kind of unique trick: you also have mouse control, which you can use to connect blocks and remove them match-3 style. But as the game progresses and you explore the world, it reveals some twists on its mechanics that give it a lot of staying power.

The Roottrees are Dead is another document exploration mystery, this one building a family tree of a candy-making dynasty and understanding their history. It has an interesting combination of ways to confirm you're on the right track: both Obra Dinn's "get three people right to lock in" and a database query (searching its simulation of the 90's Internet). The original free (AI art-based) release added them both to the detective game genre toolkit, and the commercial release with human art and a bonus campaign makes it something I can recommend without qualifications.

Strange Antiquities is a sequel to Strange Horticulture, where instead of a shop of mysterious plants you've got a shop full of mysterious artifacts to identify and give out. It's a nice iteration on the previous games, with some new mechanics that the new form factor allows. Plus there's a pettable cat and some cute Easter eggs.

Strange Jigsaws is a lovely little mishmash of puzzles, starting with jigsaws as a base and iterating on it in many different ways. Between its humor working for me, using something well-known to start with, and having a solid hint guide on the website. it gets my Puzzle Game of the Year (For Non-Sickos) award.

The Seance of Blake Manor looked like another investigation game, but it wound up triggering the adventure/visual novel side of my brain more. It ties together a bunch of different religions/mythologies of that era with an underlying Irish folklore in a really interesting way, and while unraveling the mysteries wasn't super challenging it was interesting.

Hollow Knight: Silksong is a large and well-done Metroidvania. I liked the first Hollow Knight and played the randomizer of it some, so it wasn't surprising that I enjoyed Silksong as well. There was a lot of discourse around difficulty, but I found the level of challenge reasonable (some parts of it I only got to after the post-launch nerfs, though).

I played most of Rhythm Doctor in its early access, but since it reached 1.0 this year it goes on this list. It's a one-button rhythm game where you press the button on beat 7 of the pattern it shows you. Of course, there are a bunch of tricks and twists to it, and handling multiple patterns at once, that makes it challenging as you go on. That plus the story that integrates with the songs and the gameplay well made it compelling for me.

I wasn't expecting Kirby Air Riders to be my GameCube-era nostalgia pick, but it had the chill multiplayer vibes that worked for me in the last few months. They did a good job of keeping the feel of the GameCube game with extra stuff throughout. The singe-player mode was the addition there that made it feel most worth it when I'm not going to be playing local multiplayer- it's not deep by any means, but it's cute and has some fun moments.

Some games that were on the bubble: Angeline Era (What it's doing is interesting, but I'm bad at it and not that far in), the Rise of the Golden Idol DLCs, Monster Hunter Wilds... this year was a lot. I'll probably do another wrap-up post of my gamedev projects this year as well, but that does it for the best stuff I played!